Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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An intellectually exhilarating look at neuroplasticity … Eagleman’s skill as teacher, bold vision, and command of current research will make this superb work a curious reader’s delight” At the beginning, neuroscientist Eagleman notes how DNA gets all the credit for being the basis of life but deserves only half. Every animal today possesses DNA identical to that of 30,000 years ago, and its behavior is also indistinguishable. A caveman with identical DNA might look like us, but their actions and thoughts would be utterly foreign. Credit goes to the human brain, entirely the creation of DNA at birth but unfinished. “For humans at birth,” writes the author, “the brain is remarkably unfinished, and interaction with the world is nec­essary to complete it.” Unlike an arm or stomach, the brain is a dynamic system, a general-purpose computing device that changes in response to experience. With this introduction, Eagleman is off and running. In the first of many delightful educational jolts, he notes that the mature brain contains regions with specific functions, but under magnification, its billions of nerve cells, which form trillions of connections, look the same. What’s happening? The brain does not think or hear or touch anything. “All it ever sees are electrochemical signals that stream in along different data cables,” writes the author, but it works brilliantly to extract patterns from this input. As we age, our brain figures out a set of rules, which the author lays out in his conclusion. At birth it possesses enormous flexibility because it must literally learn how to function. Children can learn several languages fluently, but after age 10, new languages come with an accent. If a child is kept in the dark and silence for several years after birth, they will never see or talk. Neurons compete as fiercely as they cooperate. If one area stops functioning, others take over. Thus, when the vision region falls silent from blindness or even a few hours in a blindfold, input from hearing or touch moves in. To fend off this intrusion during sleep, Eagleman theorizes, our vision area continues to operate by generating dreams. Delivers an intellectually exhilarating look at neuroplasticity . . . Eagleman’s skill as teacher, bold vision, and command of current research will make this superb work a curious reader’s delight.” — Publishers Weekly (starred) The answers to these questions are right behind our eyes. The greatest technology we have ever discovered on our planet is the three-pound organ carried in the vault of the skull. This book is not simply about what the brain is; it is about what it does. The magic of the brain is not found in the parts it’s made of but in the way those parts unceasingly reweave themselves in an electric, living fabric.

This might sound fantastical, but we all carry this futuristic machinery inside our skulls. At the moment, we have no idea how to build this stuff. But we know it should be possible, because everyone reading these words is an existence proof: your biology includes 3 pounds of this alien computational material. The possessors of this livewired machinery, we drop into the world and absorb everything around us, from our local languages to the beliefs of our societies. DT: I wanted to ask you a bit about neurolaw, which I know is an area you’ve been involved with for a long time. Would you mind explaining what this means and why it’s an area worth focusing on? Eagleman is a TED speaker, a Guggenheim Fellow, and serves on several boards, including the American Brain Foundation and the The Long Now Foundation. He is the Chief Scientific Advisor for the Mind Science Foundation, and the winner of Claude Shannon Luminary Award from Bell Labs and the McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication. What are your views on Elon Musk ’s Neuralink enterprise, which is developing implantable brain-machine interfaces? Elon Musk with the surgical robot from his August 2020 Neuralink presentation. Photograph: Neuralink/AFP/Getty Images

For the past half-century or more the brain has been spoken of in terms of a computer. What are the biggest flaws with that particular model?

I was really excited to read this book. I have previously read Eagleman’s ‘The Brain’ and enjoyed his TV show in the same subject. Since first learning of plasticity during neurophysiology lectures at university I have been fascinated by the brain’s ability to adapt. DT: What advice do you have for people who want — and this is a terrible term — to get the most out of their brains? Are there lifestyle changes we should be making or things we should seek to learn to promote a sort of brain health? DT: You talked about coronavirus and, certainly, there are changes that are thrust upon us whether we like it or not. People might lose their jobs or careers and have to [develop new skills]. But what are some of the small things people might do proactively? You will never think about your brain in the same way again. The brain is often portrayed as an organ with different regions dedicated to specific tasks. But that textbook model is wrong. The brain is a dynamic system, constantly modifying its own circuitry to match the demands of the environment and the body in which it finds itself. If you were to zoom into the living, microscopic cosmos inside the skull, you would witness tentacle-like extensions grasping, bumping, sensing, searching for the right connections to establish or forego, like denizens of a country establishing friendships, marriages, neighbourhoods, political parties, vendettas, and social networks. It's a mysterious kind of computational material, an organic three-dimensional textile that adjusts itself to operate with maximum efficiency. You use this colonial image a lot in the book, a sense of the processes and struggles of evolution being fought out within the brain itself.

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Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University; codirector of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute No technology yet exists to enable this kind of flexible machine intelligence, which underscores the immensity of the challenge Eagleman is posing. While “Livewired ” is long on enthusiasm (and rightfully so), it’s a bit short on guidance for emulating or augmenting the adaptable system inside our heads. It’s easy for the hype that surrounds brain plasticity to get ahead of reality, as when Elon Musk’s Neuralink prototype — branded as a “Fitbit in your skull” to enhance neural activity — proved to be basically a miniaturized set of electrodes. David Eagleman är professor i neurovetenskap vid Stanford och har grundat företaget NeoSensory som tillverkar armband med vibrationsmotorer vilka kan ge döva förmågan att höra. A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.